The cellular industry billing protocol and standard is Calling and Sending Party Pays (CPP) as there are many technical, commercial and social challenges to successfully deploying Receiving Party Pays (RPP) services. Notwithstanding, there are approximately three billion people that cannot afford cellular services. Thus, the future of this industry hinges on delivering a frictionless and socially congruent billing reversal.
With respect to telephony, the challenge in delivering RPP is both technical as well as behavioral. Conventional service terminates traffic on the destination network incurring cost, and there is little option other than charging the caller. Moreover, given the almost ubiquitous adoption of prepaid service worldwide, reversing call charges in synchronous communication would require interoperable “hot billing” amongst a myriad of proprietary vendors to debit the recipient in near real time. Behavioral aspects are equally daunting. Since it is permissive based, conventional RPP is an inherently stigmatized protocol.
CPP naturally lends itself to store and forward technologies such as voicemail, permitting callers to pay for and deposit a message and recipients to freely withdraw. While voicemail is in essence the catch all to a failed conversation, it has recently evolved into a secondary, half duplex, voice offering that permits callers to unobtrusively deposit a recorded message on an originating network, that is then made locally accessible to the recipient on the terminating network, addressing the technical interconnect and the social “hit and miss” nature of the legacy service.
This new voice capability is delivered on the widespread deployment of Internet Multimedia Service gateways and Private Branch Exchanges (IMS and IPBX), which permit local telephony access to remotely stored data, delivering what could be termed a “voice browser”. Voice Short Messaging Service (VSMS) is one such industry development well known to those skilled in the art. The principal attraction is in permitting a caller to deposit a short voice message to a called party, without ringing the destination, a capability that has come to be known as “ring free” messaging.
However, the “ring free” capability is not free of cost. The caller is still charged a cost for depositing the message. There is currently no known way for users, particularly the large number of low income users, to deposit a message for free (i.e., without incurring a cost). Specifically, there is no known way to remove a charge imposed upon a sender under the CPP billing protocol.